Hall received bachelor’s degrees in literature from both Harvard (1951) and Oxford (1953) universities and at the latter received the Newdigate Prize in 1952 for his poem “ExileExile. ” He was a junior fellow at Harvard (1954–57) and then taught at the University of Michigan (1957–75). His volume of poetry, Exiles and Marriages (1955), exhibits the influence of his academic training. In The Dark Houses (1958) Hall showed a richer emotional range, presaging the intuitive, often idiosyncratic later work collected in A Roof of Tiger Lilies (1964), The Alligator Bride (1968), The Yellow Room (1971), and The Town of Hill (1975). Subsequent volumes include Kicking the Leaves (1978), The One Day: A Poem in Three Parts (1988), Old and New Poems (1990), and Blue (1994).

The author’s critical views and theories of literature are presented in Marianne Moore: The Cage and the Animal (1970), Writing Well (1973), Goatfoot Milktongue Twinbird (1978), To Read Literature, Fiction, Poetry, Drama (1981), The Weather for Poetry (1982), and Death to the Death of Poetry: Essays, Reviews, Notes, Interviews (1994), among other works. He also published String Too Short to Be Saved (1961; rev. ed., 1979); several books on baseball, notably Fathers Playing Catch with Sons (1985); and a biography of the sculptor Henry Moore. He edited The Oxford Book of American Literary Anecdotes (1981), The Oxford Book of Children’s Verse in America (1985), and other anthologies. In 2006 Hall was named poet laureate consultant in poetry to the Library of Congress.